Appeal is used to allow the audience to associate with a character, using the design as well as the narrative. It makes the audience care and be invested in the story; people will not watch something if they don’t care about the characters. Furthermore, characters also have to feel “real” to an extent. When designing characters you can consider what aspects of a character might make someone interested in them, what performance traits might endear the audience to the character as well as make them trust and empathise with them, or forgive them. Characters can have unique traits in their actions or appearance that appear regularly to the audience to make them more familiar to the audience. As an example a character might have a catchphrase that they say when they enter a scene, which will make them memorable and the audience will expect this from them when they see them next.

When designing characters it is useful to keep in mind that you cannot make something too close to realistic as it may fall into uncanny valley territory. If something is slightly off, the audience will not be able to relate to the character and instead meet it with disdain. This can be utilized if you do not want the audience to relate to a certain character or want them to seem alien and different. However there is a tipping point where a character can be realistic enough to fall back into generating positive responses from viewers. Different research has been done on this effect and different potential reasons for why humans have this reaction have been hypothesized, such as that this “almost-human” feeling reminds humans of death, or that humans may consider “almost-human” things as being judged on the standard of other real humans as compared to robots with human traits.

Narratively how characters can change can have a great effect on their appeal, such as when a character begins a story as a villain and eventually becomes “good” in the story. Even if the character is completely evil they can still be relatable in some way to make them less of a caricature and more of a realistic character to be empathized with, in spite of their evil actions. For example in “Breaking Bad”, Walter White commits terrible crimes, but because you are watching from his perspective and you can relate to him, you may even begin to think that his actions are justified and that he is not doing anything wrong.